1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to collecting and gathering used and discarded post-consumer carpet, for shredding and recycling, so that the polymers in discarded carpet (mainly nylon fibers from the tufting material, and polypropylene from the backing layer) can be used productively, rather than being disposed of in landfills.
2. Background Art
A number of efforts have been made to organize and run carpet recycling operations in an efficient and profitable manner. None of the prior efforts have succeeded, and most companies that have attempted to undertake this effort have gone bankrupt, or were shut down by a parent company, after losing millions of dollars. Although few details of such failed efforts have ever been published, many people who have worked with carpet recycling efforts are familiar with a number of past failures, which can be exemplified by the bankruptcy of United Recycling, Inc. (Minneapolis, Minn.) in the 1990's, and the decision by the Honeywell Company to halt the operations of its “Evergreen” recycling operation in Georgia in 2001. Numerous other examples could also be named.
At the current time (i.e., prior to the adoption of the system disclosed herein), nearly all companies that are still trying to work with carpet recycling must simply ignore and disregard the largest category (by far) of all waste carpet that is being disposed of today. This category is usually called “post-consumer carpet” (often abbreviated as PCC), and it includes any and all carpet that has been installed and actually walked on, in any type of building or facility (such as a residence, office, retail store, restaurant, etc). Since so many companies that tried to handle post-consumer carpet went bankrupt and never managed to succeed, most carpet recyclers that are still in business today barely survive economically, and limit their efforts to only a small portion of the carpet business, which is limited to so-called “post-industrial” waste, which includes materials such as: (i) clean, never-installed rolls of carpet which are being discarded because they didn't meet color or quality standards, or because they are surplus inventory that was not expected to sell; (ii) scrap or waste material that was generated as a byproduct of a manufacturing process, such as when the edges of carpets are trimmed off when carpet rolls are cut down to 12-foot widths; and, (iii) various other types of scraps, byproducts, or other wastes that are generated during textile or fiber manufacturing or other handling operations.
Although clean and never-used “post-industrial” carpet waste (and other post-industrial textile and fiber waste) is created in quantities that would seem surprisingly large to most people, the fact is that post-consumer carpet (i.e., which has been installed and walked on, and which was subsequently removed from a floor) comprises the largest fraction (by far) of carpet that is discarded each year in any industrial nation. Since most carpet recyclers refuse to even try to handle post-consumer carpet, an estimated 5 billion pounds of used post-consumer carpet are being buried, every year, in landfills in the U.S. Since a million pounds of discarded carpet will cover roughly 2 acres of land, one foot deep, the fact that multiple billions of pounds of carpet are being sent to landfills, every year, poses a major solid waste problem. The polymer fibers in carpet will not biodegrade for hundreds or even thousands of years; therefore, discarded carpet segments will just continue to sit in landfills, taking up huge amounts of bulk space.
In addition, even though it won't biodegrade, discarded carpet that gets wet quickly becomes an ideal incubator for mold, mildew, and other noxious microbes that emit foul odors and leachates. That microbial growth will attract insects, which in turn will attract vermin, birds, etc.
Numerous people and government agencies have recognized that continuing to send staggeringly large quantities of discarded carpet to landfills is simply unacceptable, and better alternatives must be developed. Two important recent developments along those lines were recently launched by a group of companies, carpet industry organizations, and officials at state and federal environmental protection agencies, who met in Atlanta, Georgia in January 2002 and signed a document called, “A Memorandum of Understanding for Carpet Stewardship.” This document, along with copies or summaries of various other documents and developments that preceded it, are summarized and/or available for downloading at www.moea.state.mn.us/carpet/index.cfm, on a website run by the Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance (MOEA), which has been one of the most active moving forces behind the drive to recycle carpet, and which also has been a major force in the Midwestern Workgroup on Carpet Recycling. The Carpet and Rug Institute, an industry organization that includes more than 90% of the carpet industry in the U.S. as its members, also signed and endorsed that Memorandum in January 2002.
The same companies, agencies, and organizations that created and signed the Memorandum on Carpet Stewardship also created an organization called “Carpet America Recovery Effort” (CARE), which will soon have a website, at www.carpetrecycle.org. CARE is intended to function as a consortium and coordinating body; instead of being owned or controlled by any single participant in the field, it will be responsible to all companies and agencies that helped create it, and it will help organize, motivate, coordinate, and publicize efforts to achieve the goals set forth in the Memorandum.
The Memorandum itself merely set forth some general goals, which include two major goals with a target date that was set ten years in the future. According to the Memorandum, by the year 2012, the industry should be recycling at least 20 to 25% of all carpet; and, the industry should be using methods such recycling, reuse, burning in cement kilns, etc., to divert at least 40% of the carpet that would otherwise be sent to landfills.
However, the Memorandum explicitly stated that none of its goals were binding or enforceable in any way, and nothing in that Memorandum created any legal obligations or rights. It was merely a statement of goals, without describing any means or methods for accomplishing those goals, and its main target date was a full decade in the future. Accordingly, it offers an overview of the problem, and now it's up to people and companies working in this field to find some answers.
One problem that has severely hindered and frustrated all efforts to recycle post-consumer carpet over the years has been the difficulty of sorting and separating discarded carpet segments into types of polymers, such as nylon-6, nylon-6,6, PET, polypropylene, and mixed polymer weaves. Because of certain chemical structures in polymerized strands of nylon, the two major classes of nylon used in carpet manufacturing are called nylon-6, and nylon-6,6; these two types of nylon account for roughly 70% of all carpet being manufactured. Although both names contain the digit “6”, those two different forms of nylon have substantially different chemistry. If mixed together, they cannot be melted or chemically treated without creating serious problems in the resulting chemical product.
It is not difficult for a manufacturing company or wholesaler to clearly label never-used carpet as either nylon-6 or nylon-6,6; however, it would be very difficult and expensive for a carpet recycling company to make that same distinction, for each and every one of the thousands of rolls or piles of used post-consumer carpet that would arrive at a large and active shredding or processing facility, every week. This is one of the main reasons why no companies have yet been able to make a substantial profit by handling post-consumer carpet, and why nearly all companies that are still working with carpet recycling today have sharply restricted limited their activities, and will accept only clean “post-industrial” carpet waste, such as manufacturing scrap, and carpet rolls that were rejected for quality reasons or discarded as unwanted surplus inventory.
Another problem that has blocked and frustrated efforts to develop efficient and economical methods for collecting discarded post-consumer carpet relates to the fact that, in nearly any large city, new carpets are installed (and old carpets are removed) by numerous small companies. In almost all cases, the same workers who will be installing a new carpet will also be responsible for removing any old carpets that must be removed and discarded. Due to a combination of financial factors that have major impacts on the net profits of any carpet seller (including taxes, liability risks, insurance concerns, employee benefit costs, etc.), nearly all carpet installers work as independent contractors. Very few carpet installing companies have more than 10 employees, and the large majority of such companies have only one or two trucks. Many of these companies use immigrant laborers, who often speak little or no English, and many of those workers are not even employees; instead, they are hired on a day-to-day, as-needed basis, depending on how much work is scheduled for a given day. The typical workday starts by about 7 am, and ends by about 3 or 4 pm, when the loaded truck drops off the load of old carpet that was removed from a job site, and then drops off the workers, who have the rest of the afternoon free.
On a typical job, any old and worn carpet that must be removed from the job site is usually cut into strips, up to about 6 feet wide. These strips are then cut into convenient lengths, and the resulting strips are rolled up and tied at both ends, most commonly by using cheap twine, duct tape, etc. This creates rolls of discarded carpet which typically weigh in the range of about 50 to about 80 pounds. These rolls, which are often referred to as “cigar rolls”, are light enough and short enough to allow a single worker to hoist a roll onto one shoulder, and carry it out to the truck without needing help from another worker. This method of cutting and rolling discarded carpets into rolls less than about 6 feet long also reduces the risk that a worker carrying a roll on one shoulder might trip and fall, bang the end of the roll into a light fixture or door jamb, or scrape and damage the finish on a piece of furniture, wall, or door.
When the truck has been loaded with the worn discarded carpet and is ready to leave the job site, the driver will take it to any destination that will accept rolls of used and worn carpet. Reputable carpet installers usually take these rolls to landfill sites, or to a collection bin or cage which is adjacent to, or run by, the store or warehouse that sold the carpet they installed that day. However, landfill owners charge money for drop-offs, and the place that sold the carpet may be out of the way, for an installer who wants to finish up and start enjoying the rest of the afternoon. Inevitably, a substantial amount of post-consumer carpet simply gets dumped, in inappropriate and often illegal locations.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,341,699 (Langerak, et al.) discloses a method and apparatus for sorting carpet or similar types of material. The invention relates to a method for sorting carpet or similar pieces of material to material type and the like, wherein the method comprises the following steps of: placing pieces of carpet on a transport system; disentangling or separating the pieces of carpet on a transport system; fixing pieces of carpet individually to a guide system; recognizing the type of carpet during movement along the guide system; and releasing a piece of carpet into or onto a relevant location determined by the recognition.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,952,660 (Kip, et al.) discloses a method of identifying post consumer or post industrial waste carpet utilizing a hand-held infrared spectrometer. Kip describes a method and apparatus for use in the recycling of post consumer or post industrial waste carpet or Polyamide-6 and/or Polyamide-66 containing non-carpet waste utilizes a hand-held portable device utilizing spectroscopic principles to identify the material of the waste (carpet). The spectrometer envisioned for this task includes an infrared radiation source for illuminating the waste (carpet) sample, a selector for selecting a predetermined number of discrete wavelengths and a detection system to detect reflected radiation within the discrete wavelengths. The selector can be either a plate with a plurality of slots which positionally correspond to locations in a dispersed light beam according to the predetermined discrete wavelengths or a plurality of filters selected to pass the discrete wavelengths. The selection of the discrete wavelengths can either take place before the carpet sample is irradiated or can take place by selecting the discrete wavelengths from reflected radiation.
European Patent No. EP0372906 (Foster) discloses an article sorting apparatus. A method and apparatus for sorting articles from a series of batched collection of articles, so that a tally is kept of how many articles of a given type are received from each one of a variety of sources in a series of batched collections, is disclosed. The method avoids the task of attaching an identification tag to each article, and includes the steps of attaching each of the articles in a collection sequentially to clip means associated with a transporter device, attaching, adjacent to the sequentially suspended collection of articles, means indicating, by use of coded data provided thereupon, the origin or identity of the collection, moving the clip means and the articles suspended therefrom along the transporter device, viewing each article on the transporter device at a data keying station, and keying data to a computer to identify the type of article and its sequential position in the collection on the transporter device, forwarding the articles to a series of switch means and causing selected ones of the switch means to operate to open a clip means in a computer-controlled sequence determined by the keyed-in identifying data, so that all articles of any one type are released at a pre-determined position on the transporter device appropriate to that type.
This overview is not meant to be critical or derogatory; it is simply intended to help the reader understand why no company trying to recycle post-consumer carpet has ever succeeded in creating an effective way to organize dozens or hundreds of independent small-company carpet installers, in a large city, into a trained and cooperating network that will function in a smoothly coordinated manner, to ensure that worn and discarded carpet segments will be properly delivered to a recycling facility.
Accordingly, one object of this invention is to create a coordinated system that will allow numerous independent contractors that are already working as carpet installers to deliver post-consumer carpet to a recycling facility in an economical and efficient manner that can generate a fair profit for the carpet installers.
Another object of this invention is to disclose a system of interacting machines and devices that will provide a collection system for post-consumer carpet, which can be used efficiently and reliably by dozens or hundreds of independent contractors, without requiring those contractors to go through extensive training, or deal with cumbersome and annoying paperwork and administrative chores.
Another object of this invention is to create and provide a collection system for used carpet which meshes smoothly with the existing practices and customs of most carpet installing contractors, and which will be adapted quickly and efficiently by carpet installers because it offers a simple and practical method for them to reap additional income and profits from their ongoing operations.
Another object of this invention is to establish and provide a carpet collection and recycling system that provides a relatively tamper-resistant accounting and payment system that provides carpet installers with prompt cash payments for participating in the system.
Another object of this invention is to establish and provide a system that allows bar-coded tags or labels to be used to allow rapid and accurate identification of rolls of used carpet, using computerized scanners, in a recycling operation.
Another object of this invention is to provide a system that will allow a carpet recycling company to have numerous small batches of dirty post-consumer carpet delivered to it, each day or week, by numerous carpet installer companies, in a manner which allows those rolls to be passed through scanning and sorting machines that can rapidly sort the batches into appropriate categories for subsequent handling.
Another object of this invention is to provide a system that will allow relatively small batches of used and dirty carpet to be delivered to a number of distributed shipping containers, which can be stored in convenient parking locations, and which can be closed and locked to protect the collected carpet from rain, theft, vermin, and other hazards, and which will allow the shipping containers, when reasonably full, to be conveniently hauled away from their parking locations, taken to a central recycling plant, and replaced by empty containers at the same parking locations.
Another object of this invention is to create and provide a carpet recycling system that can use automated equipment, such as x-ray machines and/or metal detectors, to scan arriving rolls of used discarded carpet, to ensure that they do not contain metallic or other unwanted hard objects which are larger than staples, and which might damage the equipment or possibly injure nearby employees, if loaded into a chopping or shredding machine. In addition, another related object of this invention is to provide a semi-automated system that allows rolls of discarded carpet which contain metal debris or other unwanted hard objects (larger than staples) to be diverted, automatically, into a separate handling system, which will allow the metallic or other undesired objects to be removed, and which will then allow the remaining carpet segments to be returned to the conveyor system, for chopping and shredding.
These and other objects of the invention will become more apparent through the following summary, drawings, and description of the preferred embodiments.